#mechanic-development

This sprint was mainly just responding to the usability data we got last week! I’ll show off a couple of the easier to record things below..

Shot Colour

Super simple one, but we’ve had the nice emissive textures on our guns for a while. These are designed to look like energy reserves and so we’ve coloured the bullets to match!

Stats in UI

All the weapons stats are now randomly generated and are reflected in the UI, as well as how they compare to your worst weapon! This really helps to add some motivation to the game so far - you’re looking for better guns.

Main Menu

And finally, here is the current main menu. We think it looks really clean and matches all the theming so far really nicely. The audio settings all work and saving/loading is super close to being completed.

That’s it for this week - we did a lot more than is in these videos, but some of it isn’t very visual. Some other things we sorted out is some UI bugs with the inventory, tweaking some values here and there as well as adjusting the sound played by guns based on their fire rate.

This week was one of our first formal deadlines for this project! We needed to deliver a short pitch and then get people to have a go on the game. We got a ton of really useful feedback and also some great usability results.

It’s been a bit of a mad rush in terms of development this week (especially the last few days!) but here are some samples of what we’ve added.

Audio

This is the most up to date demo of our audio so far! Loads of layers of audio with the engines really make them feel powerful.

Modular Ship Improvements

This weekend marked quite a few hidden away improvements with how we’re handling the players modular weapons. This video shows off some UI changes in that scene, as well as the fact that you can now actually equip the guns you select! Keep an eye out for the end of that video, you might spot one of the great explosions made by Griff!

Enemy Weapon Spawns

This video was originally showing off our enemies wandering around the world a bit - but it also shows off the fact that they can spawn with and carry their own weapons! This uses the procedural weapon system that’s already in the game. They can also drop their own weapons, ready for you to plug in and use.